In our super legacy text game code - http://www.ironrealms.com - we have some variables that someone came up with called temp1 and minor1 about 15 years ago.
In those days it was impossible for our code to use anything but global variables. So we had these stupid variables used in a million places throughout all our code. Needless to say it caused endless bug headaches in the games. Anyways, that came to mind when reading about foobar, as I probably would have killed someone if I had ever seen foo or bar used as a variable.

Yeah, a petition is not really going to do anything. Just think what advertising is going to be like in the next 25 years. Just naked people saying 'Play with me now!'. What do you think, will that work for my games? http://www.ironrealms.com
I will have to start using a ton more naked ascii art.

Games that run in your web browser are all the rage, and understandably so. Why not build your game for the largest audience in the world, using freely available technology, and pay zero licensing fees? One such game is Evony, formerly known as Civony – a browser-based clone of the game Civiliza...

Sorry to dredge up the old post, but I really enjoyed your article and the images of the old school keyboard controllers. Those are crazy.
I remember the hour upon hours of programming I did on the old Apple computers (in addition to playing billions of hours of games). It is amazing to think back of the progression from playing and programming dinky little games to what we do today. I run a really old school, online text game company - http://www.ironrealms.com - but it is still the same old thing, hours of endless fun playing games, and coding games.
Wouldn't trade it for the world.

Edsger Dijkstra had this to say about Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. I'm sure...

I remember I first started programming on apple computers in junior high school trying to create text games like zork. It was horribly written, slow, painful, and only I played them so I knew all the answers. I keep trying to relive those days by playing games like Avatar IV, but those games are not even fun anymore (just down right painful) Now I am running a text adventure game company - http://www.ironrealms.com - and loving every second of it.

For many programmers, our introduction to programming was our dad forcing us to write our own games. Instead of the shiny new Atari 2600 game console I wanted, I got a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a computer instead. That's not exactly what I had in mind at the time, of course, but that fateful dec...